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298 S T R AT E G I C O R G A N I Z AT I O N 5 ( 3 )
by the perspective that social sciences or applied academic business fields bene-
fit from non-overlapping domains.
We recognize that there is the potential for negative outcomes in any rela-
tionship that is not managed well, and we discuss some of these issues at the end
of our essay. However, the purpose of the essays in this anniversary issue is to look
towards the future of strategic organization scholarship. Therefore, our primary
focus in this essay is exploring some of the ways that the study of strategic organ-
ization can benefit from the incorporation of entrepreneurship researchers and
research. In our view, anything that elicits recognition of entrepreneurship’s dis-
tinctive contribution within strategic organization is likely to sustain and improve
the impact of entrepreneurship research, while also enriching strategic organiza-
tion. The approach we take in this essay is to ground our discussion in issues and
questions for strategic organization raised in previous ‘So!apbox’ essays. We offer
some ideas about how entrepreneurship research might address those and other
issues. We organize our discussion in two main parts: first, we discuss potential
contributions of entrepreneurship to the theoretical development of strategic
organization, and second, we discuss how entrepreneurship research may con-
tribute to improving the practical usefulness of strategic organization.
B A K E R & P O L L O C K : M A K I N G T H E M A R R I A G E WO R K 299
frequently ‘black boxed’) in strategy and organization theory research can actu-
ally be observed as they play out in young organizations.
A recurring issue in strategic organization reflected in previous ‘So!apbox’
essays is the relative value of focusing on individual-level vs organizational-level
processes. Hambrick (2004: 94) argued in his ‘So!apbox’ essay that ‘we need to
reintroduce the human element to our research’, because ‘human beings have
been largely discarded from a great part of strategic management research’. And
in their essay, Felin and Foss (2005) express frustration that much of the stra-
tegic organization literature assumes the taken-for-granted status of organizations
and pays too little attention to the individuals that constitute organizations and
the potentially consequential differences among them.1 They also point out that
many attempts at ‘multi-level’ studies have been unsatisfactory. As a reaction to
what they see as the organization-centric presumptions and ‘methodological
collectivism’ of current research, they call for a strong form of methodological
individualism (Heath, 2001; Popper, 1945; Watkins, 1957), one that assumes
the primacy of individuals in understanding strategic organization.
We appreciate Felin and Foss’s frustration and their attempt to provide
some corrective for what they see as the one-sided dominance of methodo-
logical collectivism in research in strategic organization. But what they express
as epistemological and ontological commitments, we see as empirical questions
of fundamental importance.2 The question is not whether individuals or organ-
izations have primacy, but rather what are the processes and conditions that
allow, or require, one or the other to take on more or less primacy.
The creation and development of new organizations offers an extraordinary
laboratory to study the processes through which individual-level elements give
rise to organizations that may subsequently either extend or effectively annihi-
late the strategic consequences of individual differences. To us, the question of
individual vs organizational primacy is first a question of the processes through
which the beliefs, goals and strategies of would-be entrepreneurs are expressed
and furthered by the organizations they build. As Hannan and Freeman (1989:
81) noted, early on the new firm is a malleable extension of the founder’s per-
sonality. Research has backed the contention that origins matter, and shown
that differences among founders’ cognitive models are surprisingly consequen-
tial in shaping the firm’s organizational structure and employee interactions
long after founding (Burton et al., 1999; Hannan et al., 1996). But what are the
processes that maintain or sever this close tie between personality and organiza-
tion? What leads an organization to continue reflecting its founder’s goals, when
and why does it adopt others’ goals, and how and when does it effectively take
on a life of its own such that strategies are driven by the organization’s routines,
capabilities and resources in combination with institutionalized expectations
about what an organization should be and do, rather than by any particular set
of individuals? Perhaps equally important, how and through what processes do
new firms remain open to strategic change based on the individual goals and
attributes of employees who join well after founding?
300 S T R AT E G I C O R G A N I Z AT I O N 5 ( 3 )
B A K E R & P O L L O C K : M A K I N G T H E M A R R I A G E WO R K 301
302 S T R AT E G I C O R G A N I Z AT I O N 5 ( 3 )
B A K E R & P O L L O C K : M A K I N G T H E M A R R I A G E WO R K 303
A second broad theme recurring in the ‘So!apbox’ essays concerns the appropri-
ate role of practicality and usefulness in shaping and evaluating research on
strategic organization. At the most general level, the gist of the argument is that
strategic organization is simultaneously a descriptive, theoretical and applied
field, and that at least some researchers would like to have their theoretical work
be of direct practical relevance. Whittington (2003: 122), for example, notes:
I have been teaching strategy and organization for about 15 years, but I know very
little about how to do strategizing and organizing. When called in some small way to
help with others’ strategy and organization-making, I have hardly anything to say
about how they should carry out the actual work of producing new plans and
designing new structures.
Whittington’s comments lucidly express the limitations of our work that frus-
trate many scholars.
While Whittington (2003) worries over the practical aspects of strategy schol-
arship, Hoffman (2004) holds strategy out as an exemplar of practical usefulness
and impact – at least relative to organization theory research. Hoffman argues that
because of its grounding in the social science and humanities disciplines, organiza-
tion theory research strongly prefers questions of theoretical relevance over ques-
tions of practical importance and worries very little about integrating the two.4
The good news here is that entrepreneurship is perhaps the most applied of
the management fields, and strategic organization, through its acquisition of
entrepreneurship, has a wonderful opportunity to gain practical relevance and
value. The bad news is that entrepreneurship itself has not got the balance
between the theory and practice perspectives quite right. In contrast to
Hoffman’s (2004) characterization of organization theory as too heavily
weighted toward the theoretical, some have argued that entrepreneurship as a
field may be too heavily weighted toward practice (Brush et al., 2003).
This slant may be due, in part, to how many universities have handled the
teaching demands of the subject. Teaching entrepreneurship requires a high
degree of practical applicability, and many schools have responded by relying
heavily on successful entrepreneurs without a background in or commitment to
research to teach their courses. Such ‘professors of practice’ may be very popular
and effective teachers, but their overuse relieves pressure to hire and support
research faculty in entrepreneurship. More importantly, heavy reliance on non-
research faculty promotes the separation of teaching and research by filling
304 S T R AT E G I C O R G A N I Z AT I O N 5 ( 3 )
classrooms with people who have limited knowledge of and virtually no com-
mitment to expanding the body of entrepreneurship research. In addition, in
our observation, some researchers, especially those experienced in or otherwise
drawn to the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, come to focus on the lack of
obvious applied value in much of the entrepreneurship research in more highly
rated journals, and lose respect for and motivation to do such research. Indeed,
someone once remarked to us that the kind of research published in ‘A’ journals
has no economic value, and claimed that he now feels ‘an ethical and fiduciary
duty’ to aim his research at other outlets. Unsurprisingly, these practices create a
divide between research and practice that is reinforced through a lack of respect
for one another’s contributions by those on either side.
But now we may have painted too stark a picture. Recent years have
brought to entrepreneurship an increasing number of scholars with deep inter-
ests in both theory and practice, many of whom were trained to do strategy
research. Some, but not all of these researchers have prior experience working in
or with entrepreneurial ventures. Because the thin archival record deposited by
many start-ups requires entrepreneurship researchers to ‘get their hands dirty’,
many entrepreneurship researchers – even those without relevant prior experi-
ence – may gain an understanding of practical issues through direct research
involvement in new ventures. We think this emergent model for doing theoretic-
ally interesting and practically useful entrepreneurship research has great
promise that strategic organization should be careful not to squander. But how
can scholars of strategic organization avoid wasting this opportunity? We sug-
gest that if strategic organization wants a model that balances theory and prac-
tice, it could learn something from the medical model of research, education
and practice.5 We focus here on three elements: boundary creation and mainten-
ance, practitioner-researchers and usefulness-driven research questions.
First, the medical profession has built and maintained a set of education-
based professional standards regarding who is and who is not part of the profes-
sion and qualified to practice (Abbott, 1988). The same sorts of state sanctioning
and tight professional control are not available to faculty in strategic organiza-
tion, but we do wield non-trivial influence. As entrepreneurship research and
teaching become part of the family of strategic organization, it is incumbent on
us to resist the profligate use of non-research oriented faculty. It is very difficult
to maintain institutional respect for the need for teaching to be based on schol-
arly underpinnings, or the complementary professional recognition of the need
to develop practical underpinnings for scholarly research, if scholarship and
teaching occupy opposing sides of a chasm.
Second, much valuable practical medical research is conducted by practic-
ing physicians in teaching hospitals. The entrepreneurship centers and outreach
activities of various kinds associated with many business schools provide a simi-
lar research opportunity. Unfortunately, these centers are too often seen as pro-
viding purely ‘service’ activities designed to create support from and connection
to the local business community. Indeed, in conversations with colleagues, we
B A K E R & P O L L O C K : M A K I N G T H E M A R R I A G E WO R K 305
306 S T R AT E G I C O R G A N I Z AT I O N 5 ( 3 )
engaging in more ‘puzzle-driven’ research, of the kind that starts with the ques-
tion, ‘Why is it that …?’ (Davis and Marquis, 2005; Hambrick, 2005). In this
view, theorists of strategic organization need to build theories that are capable of
coming to terms with the meaning and findings of practice-driven research, and
then be capable of explaining and making new predictions about such research.
As Gartner (2006) put it recently, ‘the primacy of facts should drive the search
for theory that can make sense of those facts’. Complementary ideas are found
in the ‘activity-based’ approach to strategy (Jarzabkowski, 2005; Whittington,
2003). In this way, theory-driven research becomes just one part of a better-
integrated cycle of knowledge creation and application (Vermeulen, 2005).
Indeed, such a scholarly grounding in ‘what works’, conceived in the broadest
terms to embrace the myriad strategic purposes of organizations, may be the
most likely antidote to paradigm proliferation.
Thus far, we have focused on the benefits of the union between strategy and
entrepreneurship for strategic organization. We believe this takeover can yield
benefits for entrepreneurship scholarship, as well. However, we also recognize
the potential dark side for entrepreneurship research to this marriage. The
remainder of our essay focuses on these issues.
Strategy brings to the altar a set of assets useful to entrepreneurship, including
scholarly legitimacy and its accumulated experience with the process of gaining
legitimacy as a new scholarly domain (Ghemawat, 1997; Hambrick, 2004), a
large and growing cadre of well-trained scholars capable of doing rigorous and
theoretically grounded entrepreneurship research, and the ability to protect junior
scholars from egregious demands for practical engagement. Unfortunately the
threat to entrepreneurship extends, in part, from these very assets.
Part of strategy’s success and its rapid increase in institutional legitimacy has
derived from its focus on a single set of outcomes related to organizational financial
performance. While we have suggested that strategy research would benefit greatly
from embracing a much broader domain of uses, functions and outcomes, it is easy
to imagine the combination of inertia, socialization and personal preference among
strategy researchers leading to an active defense of the field’s current domain. If rela-
tive financial performance becomes the sine qua non of entrepreneurship research,
then the acquisition has failed: strategy will have squandered most of its opportun-
ity, and a primary contribution of entrepreneurship will have been squelched. This
threat is real; strategy research has itself suffered from a relatively rapid narrowing of
focus through the rising dominance of assumptions promulgated by research
grounded in economics (Ghoshal, 2005). The life that entrepreneurship can bring
through a broadened understanding of human goals and values pursued through
organizing could easily be suffocated if the calloused heel of homo economicus is
allowed to stand too heavily upon entrepreneurship’s throat.
B A K E R & P O L L O C K : M A K I N G T H E M A R R I A G E WO R K 307
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Bill Gartner, Paula Jarzabkowski, Jaume Villanueva and the editors of
Strategic Organization for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. All hyperbole
and strained metaphors remain our own.
Notes
1 We note that they seem to ignore the example of top management team research, which,
while admittedly often using demographic proxies for individual characteristics, does
attempt to explain some aspects of strategic organization in terms of specific, influential
individuals.
2 Another way to express our position is to note that we are sympathetic to the epistemological
claims of methodological individualism, whether reflecting the Weberian (1978) valorization of
the subjective underpinning of social action or the more general idea that any social explanation
benefits from ‘micro underpinnings’ in the form of explicated assumptions about individual
actors (Watkins, 1957). However, along with many others (e.g. Barnard, 1938; Durkheim,
308 S T R AT E G I C O R G A N I Z AT I O N 5 ( 3 )
1938; Goldstein, 1958; Lukes, 1968) we reject most of the ontological commitments of
methodological individualism, such as those that imply that societies, organizations and other
collectivities don’t actually exist in a way that allows us to study them usefully as social objects
(Heath, 2001). This includes claims such as Felin and Foss’s (2005: 446) approving adoption of
Coff’s (1999) argument that ‘firms do not appropriate (or perhaps even create) value; only indi-
viduals do’.
3 We label the widespread beliefs about the relationship between entrepreneurship and the two
outcomes of economic development and job growth ‘rationalized myths’ because they are
frequently bandied about as unvarnished truths by proponents of entrepreneurship, despite a
great deal of contingency and equivocation in the serious literature examining the underlying
claims.
4 The sense of relative positioning among fields strikes us as interesting in itself. For example,
in his ‘So!apbox’ essay, Hambrick (2004) decries the splintering of the field of strategic
management and fears that it will disintegrate and its various research agendas will be taken
over by other fields, including sociology. At the same time, at a recent meeting of the
American Sociological Association, one of us engaged in conversation with a very senior
scholar who bemoaned the extreme factionalization and lack of coherence in contemporary
sociology. And Shane and Venkataraman’s (2000) essay about a distinctive domain for entre-
preneurship feared mostly that entrepreneurship would be taken over by the very field that
Hambrick fears is disintegrating.
5 We are not saying that the entire medical research, teaching and practice model fits strategic
organization or that we should try to adopt such a model wholesale.
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Ted Baker is a member of the newly formed Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Department at North Carolina State University, where he teaches courses in entrepreneur-
ship and technology commercialization. His research focuses on entrepreneurship in
resource-constrained environments, and on improvisation and bricolage as forms of entre-
preneurial behavior. He has recently published articles in Administrative Science Quarterly,
Journal of Business Venturing and Research Policy. Related interests include the development of
capabilities in knowledge-intensive start-ups, the behavior of venture capitalists and institu-
tional effects within the venture capital industry. Prior to his academic career, Ted worked
in private industry for 15 years, including leadership roles in several high-growth and tech-
nology start-ups. Address: Department of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship,
College of Management, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA. [email:
Ted_Baker@ncsu.edu]
312 S T R AT E G I C O R G A N I Z AT I O N 5 ( 3 )